The problem though was that the cotton gin enabled the plantations to become even larger, which in turn caused a need for even more slave labour. When the war broke out, contrary to trends everywhere else in the civilized world, slavery was expanding and not contracting. Had the South won, or even more likely if the Civil War had never happened and the expansion of slavery picking up speed, the increasing economic need for slavery could have resulted in the factories that began to churn out everything from cars to the war materials vital for defeating the Kaiser, and then onto Hitler and the Japanese, being full of slaves. These people would have been working and living in conditions that would have been identical to what the slave labourers, most of whom ended up being exterminated, who were pressed into servitude by Nazi Germany had to endure.
American ideas about labour and the basic dignity of workers run pretty much 180 degrees counter to the progress in basic morals that most of the civilized world has made over the last couple of hundred years. It's almost like they've made it an act of immorality for a boss to have to pay his employees their rightful due from their contribution in helping to create, sustain, and make a business profitable. It continues today in the form of the crushing of the few remaining unions, the rollback of benefits for employees (in a time when the corporations are making record profits and giving our record-sized bonuses to their upper management), and also when workers are being forced to take multiple part-time jobs because too many of the full-time jobs that created the middle class have been completely eliminated. If the managers, owners, CEO's, and bosses of today are behaving like this now, 150 years after Gettysburg, how would they behaved back then in a scenario dictated by a Southern victory, or in one where the Civil War never even occurred? Why would it ever be expected that people like that would ever be concerned about the elimination of slavery?
From the lust for wealth comes all of the evils that plague the world. And unfortunately the American upper class, both in pre-bellum times as well as too often today, has turned that anti-human lust into the cruelest of art forms.
CKA Uber 
